Due testi a confronto

The two parallel biographies, the Syriac Life of Peter the Iberian, the Georgian prince who converted to Christianity, and the Life of Melania the Younger, the Roman patrician, have come down to us through a manuscript tradition and attest to the spread of monastic practices in Palestine around the 5th century. The texts allow us to investigate this phenomenon through the interpretation of selected passages which show how the common narrative of some certain significant events attests to the existence (and the fervent activity) of monastic circuits in Gaza, marked by particular lifestyles and guided by doctrinal choices. This inquiry, as well as providing important information on a certain kind of monasticism, offers the chance to make useful comparisons with the other forms of monasticism that enlivened the East in Late Antiquity.

The two parallel biographies, the Syriac Life of Peter the Iberian, the Georgian prince who converted to Christianity, and the Life of Melania the Younger, the Roman patrician, have come down to us through a manuscript tradition and attest to the spread of monastic practices in Palestine around the 5th century. The texts allow us to investigate this phenomenon through the interpretation of selected passages which show how the common narrative of some certain significant events attests to the existence (and the fervent activity) of monastic circuits in Gaza, marked by particular lifestyles and guided by doctrinal choices. This inquiry, as well as providing important information on a certain kind of monasticism, offers the chance to make useful comparisons with the other forms of monasticism that enlivened the East in Late Antiquity.